This invention relates generally to agricultural machines and more specifically to quarter-turn discharge chutes for hay balers.
Hay baling machines have conventionally been constructed to tie the finished bales with cord or wire and deposit them onto rear discharge chutes. The balers operate so that as the bales leave the binding operation they are bound with the cord or wire loops in a vertical plane. Since it is generally understood that when bales remain in the field or in storage in that position, with the binding on the bottom, drying is retarded and the binding deteriorates, several devices have been developed for the purpose of rotating the bales one-quarter turn before or during discharge.
One such device, described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,243,028, is typical of the existing art in that it involves a bale chamber extension which is essentially a bale chamber structure with slightly more than one-half the bottom surface removed and an out-rigger deflector structure attached to the side from which the half-chute is missing.
Such a construction permits a bale, which is pushed free of the bale chamber by succeeding bales, to tip sideways off of the extension. As it rotates a quarter turn it drops to the ground and is prevented from further lateral roll by the out-rigger deflector. While the out-rigger deflector also restricts misalignment to some extent, the spacing between the support ledge of the extension and the deflector must, because of the geometry of the rotating bale, be large enough to permit considerable misalignment of the bale once it is resting on the ground on its narrow surface. It is always the narrower surface which is the unbound surface.
Alignment of bales in the field has become more and more important as labor costs have gone up and machinery speeds have increased. Bale pick-up machines require good alignment of the bales for rapid operation without the use of additional manpower to first realign the bales. However, similar increases in baler ground speeds have added to the causes of misalignment. Hay bales dropping from quarter-turn discharge chutes which are moving fast tend to bounce more than those falling from slower moving balers, because of the bale's own increased momentum. Thus, bales dropped from fast moving balers still have momentum and are bouncing when they are no longer within conventional chutes, and, once moving freely, may end up misaligned.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a bale turner which will turn and more accurately align bales dropping from fast moving balers.
It is a further object of this invention to restrict the bouncing of discharged bales and to prevent bales from interfering with the motion of the baler.
It is a still further objective of this invention to permit the positioning of a bale chute essentially horizontally so that ground clearance problems are minimized and bales make contact with the ground more uniformly to prevent skewing as contact is made.